Tod Marshall
I thought Primal School must be doing something right when I got an email from Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall expressing his support for the blog and offering to connect. What I didn't expect was to receive an envelope in the mail about a week later with Range of the Possible, a compilation of Tod's own interviews with contemporary poets from Li-Young Lee to Yusef Komunyakaa. Generosity of this kind might very well be part of his incredibly full job description as the appointed ambassador of poetry in our home state. But when I wrote to him with some of my thoughts on the challenges facing poetry in our communities, his response, which startled me with its simplicity and is also captured in this interview, seemed to cut right through the fear and rancor and divisiveness facing our country to something far more essential. Even while noting fiercely (as he does here) the importance of understanding our present problems in historic terms, "I believe, truly believe, that art and kindness are why we exist," he wrote. Everything else, as they say, is technical. — HLJ
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BIRTHDAY POEM
My mother turned 60 this week,
deep in that stretch where anything
can happen (her mother died at 57).
I'm 42, and Dante's dark forest, well,
let's just say it continues to thicken,
and I know what you spiritual people
are thinking, muttering koans under
your ginger tea breath: it can happen
anytime, anywhere, to anyone, and
that's why the moon doesn't cling
as it slides across the sky. Fine.
Last fall, hiking near Priest Lake,
I came across a teenage boy covered
with blood, sobbing. He held
a compound bow with pulleys
that looked like they could move the horizon
or at least hurl a razor-edged arrow
a couple hundred feet through the breast
and heart of a skinny doe and out again
and into the shoulder of a five-month fawn that
still quivered. Cedar scales
covered the forest floor, a mossy quilt
to hush the pain, and so we pulled
on the shaft, but it was stuck in bone,
and the fawn mewled, moaned, kicked
thin legs, black hooves like chips of coal.
I told the kid to find a big rock. Quick. He did
and held it toward me, somehow confused, and I
tried to smash the skull but missed once,
shattering the eye socket and breaking the jaw,
before ending the pain and walking away among massive trees
that held the sound in the harsh ridges of bark.
Jesus, Mom, I'd meant to write a Happy Birthday poem.
When I'd gone a hundred yards,
the quiet beneath the looming cedars
was the quiet I felt as a child in your arms.
You were a little bit older than that kid. This
is the best that I can do. Above the ancient grove,
tamaracks lit the hillside in an explosive gold
glowing toward dusk. Close your eyes.
You can see them. Keep them closed.
We'll all blow together and make a wish.
Patricia Colleen Murphy
If genuine healing from a difficult and traumatic past takes place in the soul and subconscious (and not the support of the world around us), it would seem that Patricia Colleen Murphy has dedicated her path in poetry to exactly that, lifting others up the whole way. The founding editor of Superstition Review at Arizona State University won the May Swenson Poetry Award for her book Hemming Flames, a copy of which she sent to me on my request. I was opened completely by the book's rawness, an admixture of crushingly difficult memories paired with the complexities of hard-won wisdom. Here is a poet moving personal and confessional writing forward with unflinching earnestness, all the while nurturing and promoting writers into their own humanity and resilience. In every way she strikes me as such a model for writers, from her poem's empathic resonances to the way she lives her life. — HLJ
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HOW THE BODY MOVES
Melanie, the Siamese,
on the front porch with baby me.
In pictures, the two of us
are almost the same size.
Later my mother
bought Persians, bred them,
used the money for jewelry,
cigarettes, Drambouie.
The first time a litter came
she sent me searching the house
to find and clean the afterbirth.
I found the babies limp,
smothered in their sleep.
Only twenty more miles.
I am 15. My uncle is driving.
My mother has fled again in her
Oldsmobile, heading for Palo Alto.
We were fighting. She took
all the pills she could find.
My uncle sighs, repeats that
his mother died giving birth to him.
One tenth her weight, he came
screaming from her pelvis on the
coldest Minnesota day in history.
The freeway slips under us like night.
From here I think the hills are
impoverished sisters huddled for warmth
under green mohair blankets.
Seventeen of them: stomach to knee,
buttock to backbone.
We glide past their ankles.
Once I dreamt I was nine months pregnant.
When I went to the bathroom
the baby slipped out like a miraculous
bowel movement. She had blond hair,
and a T-shirt that said French Countryside.
A neighbor saw the birth through the window.
He smiled, continued mowing the back field,
and I hung a bell.
Keegan LesterThe first time I ever met Keegan Lester I was a daunted rural visitor to New York in the crushing heat of a mid-July. The impromptu tour he gave me of his favorite haunts near Columbia University (his MFA alma mater), was an unexpected gift – and the introduction to a poet whose work, perhaps more than that of any poet I’d met, mirrors his character: fierce in its insistence on gentleness, conscientious through its softspokenness, and present and alive to the world. These things made me all the gladder that Keegan’s first book of poems, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had, so I drew it, had recently won the Slope Editions Book Prize ( available for pre-order here and due for release in the coming month). In the spirit of the new year and with Keegan’s encouragement, I’m introducing multimedia to the Primal School blog with these videos he recorded. In them he discusses his love of home as an idea as well as a place we choose -- the notion that “home”, no matter how small, can be a conduit for storytelling, for sharing, and for exploring those sadnesses, elations and struggles which make people more aware of their alikeness in a time of bitter polarization and difference. I personally feel lucky to have been a recipient of his “ocean’s newfound kindness.” – HLJ
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Keegan Lester reads his poem "A Topography of This Place".
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THIS PLACE
The ocean stopped being cruel
so the sailors went home.
No one jumped from cliffs anymore.
People stopped painting and photographing the ocean
because the sentiment felt too close to a Hallmark card.
Everyone had treasure because
it was easy to find,
thus the stock market crashed.
Then the housing bubble burst
mostly not due to the ocean,
though one could speculate pirates
were going out of business and defaulting on loans.
When I say speculate, I mean I was reading
the small words that crawl at the bottom
of the newscast, but I was only half paying attention
because Erin Burnett was speaking
and she’s the most real part of this poem.
I’m speaking in metaphor of course.
The end of the world is coming
seagulls whispered to the fish
they could not eat due to their fear
of the ocean’s newfound kindness.
One of my professors spoke today.
She hates personification, treasure and linear meaning.
She hates poems not written by dead people.
She hates the ocean’s newfound kindness,
she wrote it on my poem.
Not everything can be ghosts and pirates, she says.
But that’s why I live here.
My rhododendron has never crumpled in the summer.
so the sailors went home.
No one jumped from cliffs anymore.
People stopped painting and photographing the ocean
because the sentiment felt too close to a Hallmark card.
Everyone had treasure because
it was easy to find,
thus the stock market crashed.
Then the housing bubble burst
mostly not due to the ocean,
though one could speculate pirates
were going out of business and defaulting on loans.
When I say speculate, I mean I was reading
the small words that crawl at the bottom
of the newscast, but I was only half paying attention
because Erin Burnett was speaking
and she’s the most real part of this poem.
I’m speaking in metaphor of course.
The end of the world is coming
seagulls whispered to the fish
they could not eat due to their fear
of the ocean’s newfound kindness.
One of my professors spoke today.
She hates personification, treasure and linear meaning.
She hates poems not written by dead people.
She hates the ocean’s newfound kindness,
she wrote it on my poem.
Not everything can be ghosts and pirates, she says.
But that’s why I live here.
My rhododendron has never crumpled in the summer.
Katelyn DurstIn this season of tumult and deep psychic unrest for our country, it hardly seems a coincidence that I'd been pondering bringing in new interviews with poets whose work is inseparable from their activism. Incidentally I'd also been aiming to feature younger voices. By the time of our interview, Katelyn Durst had impressed me not just with her poems of struggle and identity and longing and resilience, but her highly visible and participatory commitment to the social justice that inflames her writing. From a distance of months – I'd interviewed Katelyn back in August – it occured to me while putting together this post that "Curl" is not merely a poem about race or identity, but love. Self-love of the kind Katelyn embodies here, a kind that is so easy to forget in times such as this: just one gift of the many which poets can offer as utterances of comfort in a hurting world. – HLJ
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So you and I first met at Grunewald Guild back in May, and I was sitting with you in the lounge area by the kitchen, and you read me this poem and I remember thinking, “this girl is fearless.” Tell me a bit about this piece – what began it for you and how you wrote it.
It’s so great to hear that, because the truth is I often feel afraid. This poem came out of a homework assignment that was given to an international baccalaureate (IB) 11th grade English class I was TA-ing for this school year. The teacher assigned the poem "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, and the poem really resonated with me, with its fractured repetition. If there’s one thing people talk to me a lot about, it’s my hair. So I went home and wrote down the things I remembered people saying to me about it – as it turns out, they were overwhelmingly negative and hurtful things – and wrote them verbatim into what eventually became this poem.
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CURL
Straighten your hair just once. Blow dry it or somethin’ and it will be down to your shoulders. Fix your hair. Tie back your hair. Wear a hat over your hair. I knew that was you because of your big hair. Your hair looks like the Medusa’s snakes. Why do you have just one dread lock? Can you go back and look in the mirror. Sit still while I’m braiding your hair. Sit in this chair so I can see the top of your head. Sit outside so that your hair doesn’t get all over the kitchen floor. How do you make black hair look so nice? You should straighten it. Texturize it. Don’t brush it. Brush it with just your brown fingers. You need to buy an actual brush and a comb. Your hair is so dry it would soak up a whole tub of moisturizer. Your hair is so big. Wow, your hair is so beautiful. Can I touch your hair? Have you ever washed your hair? Is that your real hair? Can you do that to my hair? You should straighten your hair. The back of your head is a kitchen. Twist out your hair by sectioning out single sections and twisting small parts of hair together, like a two-strand braid. Make the twists stretch around your head andwear a silk cap at night to help your kitchen from getting poof or static. Long bouncy curls are cute. I saw a guy who had hair like you, so I assumed he was homeless. Men don’t like curls; they don’t want their hands to get stuck when they run their fingers in your hair. Straighten your hair. Natural is the new black, get your weave here. Put flowers in your hair. This hay will never come out of your hair. You have paint in your hair. That braid makes you look like Pocahontas. Cornrows make you look like a boy. Long braids and gym shorts make you look like a boy. Put curlers in your hair to get a more succinct pattern. Bantu knots. Sculpted Afro. Jerry curls. Did you wake up like that? The less black you look, the less likely you are to questioned by police. Don’t put wool hats on your hair, it will mess up your kitchen. How to get your most defined Wash N Go. How to make DIY Clay Wash. How to make natural, black, curly hair look elegant: Pin it up. What’s wrong with your hair? Why does your hair stick up like that? Your hair looks like a lion’s mane. Are you from Africa? Are you from India? What are you? You look like you just got here. I can’t wait to get home and see your beautiful curls...Daddy. Here is a link to several different wigs you should try. It will make you look much prettier. Straighten your hair. Just get your hair wet so it doesn’t look so dry. Is that a stick in your hair? Do you have green beetles in your hair like Bob Marley did? What kind of hairstyle is that? The straighter your hair, the more likely you are to succeed. So, just sit still. Let this heat press away your curls, your kitchen, your blackness. Let it warm you like the love you are sure to soon have.
Joseph Fasano
When I initially contacted Joseph Fasano for an interview in late July, I had several poems in mind as possibilities to discuss. But when he suggested "Hermitage" I felt in that choice something of a predestiny; it was the first poem of his I had ever read, and when we had our interview I was reminded what about it had so commanded my attention and drawn me to all of his work: lines of unusual breath and music, cultivated from language of the kind his teacher Mark Strand described as "so forceful and identifiable that you read [these poets] not to verify the meaning or truthfulness of your own experience of the world, but simply to saturate yourself with their particular voices." Rilke's "inner wilderness", twined with Fasano's bracing intelligence, were strongly in evidence throughout this exchange. — HLJ
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It strikes me that the subject on which this poem turns consists in its final two lines: "the great lie // of your one sweet life", that thing at the poem's opening that was once "too much." The speaker's address to a "you", the reader, seems to presuppose that at one time or another everyone will have to reckon with such a lie in their own lives. So let's begin there and work our way backwards…tell us a little about the great lie that began this piece.
All I know is that it's different for everybody, that great lie. It's a platitude to say that we all lie to ourselves in some way to live. Maybe we tell ourselves things are fine when they're not. Maybe we need to believe they're not fine when they are. In any case, of course it's true that a certain falseness in the way we live might protect us from a radical truth we're not ready for. Maybe we need an actual, practical change in our living situation. Maybe we need a change in our way of seeing things. Whatever the case may be, it's terrifying to face the nakedness of a new truth–or perhaps I should say an old truth, an ancient truth that has been living inside us – especially when we hardly have a language to talk about that truth.
I see this poem as the speaker's way of beginning to saying 'yes' to certain things that he had previously rejected–things perhaps in himself, things perhaps in the world. But what interests me most is the silence after the last line. It's clear to me that the speaker of this poem has yet to find a language in which to say that 'yes,' in which to live it to its fullest. I see the final question as both confident and desperate: What would you have done? What should I do? Everything we say asserts our deepest beliefs, even when we're unaware of those beliefs. But what happens when those beliefs change, radically and even perhaps without our knowing? What steps forward to fill the new silence of our lives then?
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HERMITAGE
It’s true there were times when it was too much
and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour
and drove up through the crooked way of the valley
and swam out to those ruins on an island.
Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,
and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me
like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.
When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover
tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham
relented, he did not relent.
Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.
I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,
when the river stripped the cove’s stones
from the margin and the blackbirds built
their strict songs in the high
pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice
of the branches, the moon’s brute music
touching them with fire.
And you, there, stranger in the sway
of it, what would you have done
there, in the ruins, when they rose
from you, when the burning wings
ascended, when the old ghosts
shook the music from your branches and the great lie
of your one sweet life was lifted?
Emily K. Michael
When Emily K. Michael approached Primal School about a possible interview back in May, saying that she was interested in “the tension between performance and page, and the presence of other voices (human and non-human),” I was intrigued and embarked on a lightning tour of the work of hers that was available on the web. In her eye for the world’s beauty as well as her candor in speaking about her life as a blind person, I sensed the stirrings of a rich conversation. I suggested we talk about her poem “A Phenomenology of Blindness” (originally published in Rogue Agent), with its implicit advocacy and benign but frank exploration of prejudice. I felt committed to exploring thoroughly the machinations of the poem’s central idea and was grateful for Emily’s willingness to go there with me. Discussing her work, Emerson's words came to mind: “It is not meter, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem, a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” — HLJ
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I don’t normally begin interviews by asking poets about their titles, but I’d like to begin there because of the truth claim inherent in this poem’s title. The poem is intended to be a “phenomenology.” How did the poem and idea arrive?
I suspect that this poem has been a long time coming. It responds to the intense curiosity that I often sense in others, even when it's not directly expressed. People hear that I'm blind or see me traveling with my guide dog or stopping to read the braille on the elevator, and they start firing off questions: "Is it like this? Is it like that? I bet it's like this!" So, when a colleague of mine said she was having trouble writing a blind character, I sat down and wrote this poem.
I wanted to say, "Look, it's not like any of these things." Because others’ speculation and theorizing is done in my absence — or it's done as if I'm not standing there…when I am. Whether it's a portrayal of disability in the media or an actual stranger confronting me at the coffeeshop, nondisabled people seem to take hold of stories of disability without asking us what's really going on.
"Phenomenology" seemed like the right name for a catalog of experiences that weren't what blindness is at all. And that's how the poem helped me to say that blindness isn't all of these things, but it also isn't One Thing. It isn't one story. It's this wild unruly mosaic that's part of my life.
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A PHENOMENOLOGY OF BLINDNESS
It’s not like walking through life with your glasses off.
I mean, sometimes we wear glasses, but they’re different
from yours. Thicker, broader, darker. And they don’t
work the quotidian miracle of correctable vision.
It’s not like getting your eyes dilated once a year, staggering
out to the car under those stiff black shades with the sharp edges,
tearing up beneath the merciless sun and wondering how you’ll manage
the drive home. Damn, someone just texted you and you can’t read your phone.
It’s not like groping in the dark when you come home late
and you can’t find your keys because you and your girlfriends
had too many pomegranate martinis. I know it was a birthday,
but if you could think clearly, you’d know where your keys are.
It’s not like leaving the nail salon after a pedicure, shuffling forward
in disposable flip-flops, doing everything you can not to chip that
gorgeous raspberry shimmer polish. It’s not like that at all.
It’s not like feeling faint because you forgot to eat lunch — you were
working so hard you couldn’t even stop for a granola bar, so you
cling to your colleague’s arm as he guides you outside. It’s nice
to have support, you think, nice to know he doesn’t mind helping.
It’s not convenient, popular, or cumbersome. It’s not a filter
that you can slide over the world, not a stylish coat hanging
in your closet. I, too, am waiting for winter because I love
wearing my coats — peacoats, swing coats, blazers. I have
so many! It’s just that blindness isn’t one of them.
Gary Dop. Photo credit: Parker Michels-Boyce
I have the folks at Rain Taxi to thank for introducing me to Gary Dop, who after shaking hands said “yes” to an interview, told me about his poetry, and within minutes had charmed me into buying a copy of his book, Father, Child, Water ( Red Hen Press, 2015). As I was interviewing him, I saw how this was so. In Gary’s searching poems about fatherhood, masculinity, and history, I found the same warm, vulnerable human pulse that had thudded through our first conversation. For the speaker’s refusal to let himself off easy, for its equal parts introspection, tenderness and grappling with hazard, “Little Girl, Little Lion” is a poem for anyone who’s ever loved a child. In our unedited conversation, the child inside of Gary was also on full display: he aimed to work in the words “Tupperware," “Braunschweiger,” and “Portuguese Man-of-War”, then did so with finesse. – HLJ
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Throughout your book FATHER, CHILD, WATER there’s the theme of parenthood, but also this wider lens on your family’s history, the world’s wars, things such as your father’s passion for hunting. Violence, or at least the possibility of violence, seems to loom over even your most playful poems. I think that’s especially true here – the poem’s last line landed cold in my spine.
This might surprise you, but the themes of violence and the darkness in the humor weren't apparent to me in the composition phase.
On one level, I could understand that these things were happening along the way, but I didn't recognize that I was returning to them (or that they were returning to me). My life has been a regular interaction with fear and uncertainty, and the final line of the poem is a reminder of that. I remember being struck by the final line, not knowing how to make sense of it when I wrote it, knowing that it mattered as a larger statement about my daughter (the poem is born of a real experience), and about all daughters, and about me and other fathers. Humor for me has always been a way to connect with people, but when I turn to writing, I think it also became a way to say, "I, too, feel shaken in the world. I, too, need to connect with others who will not hurt me, who want to walk together.”
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LITTLE GIRL, LITTLE LION
From the stool above our soaking dishes, she proclaims,
I can never be a poet, like it’s written on a sacred stone
In her identity’s medieval cathedral. I am her father.
She does not turn to me. Why? I ask, pulling wrinkled hands
out of the suds we share. The blue glass she’s holding slips
under the water to a hollow clank. Touching her wet elbows,
I hear, Daddy, girls can’t be poets. I’ve never thought
about how my daughter mirrors herself in Mommy
who doesn’t write. I say the right things, pull her away
from the sink to the floor, and bend to look in her
searching eyes, brown like her mother’s. They ask, Are you
sure? I rush away to find Bishop, Rich, Sexton, Dickinson –
any girl on the shelves above Where the Wild Things Are.
Showing her the stack, she pulls out Plath and opens to
“Daddy.” I snatch the book back like it’s rat poison.
Again, I can’t be trusted. Can I be trusted? How can I
wrecking-ball the commandments she’s constructed? I read
the opening stanza which ends in a sneeze,
and she’s satisfied. More Sylvia later, I say. Oh Darling,
you’ll be whatever you need to be, and if it’s Poet,
the world will learn to welcome your wild words, cathedrals
will crumble, stars supernova, and nothing
that pretends will remain – but your words are water,
your life a metaphor only you complete. I say all this,
our backs resting against the cold oven.
Lauren Camp. Photo Credit: Anna Yarrow
AWP 2016 was my sudden and massive induction into a community of poets I'd never read and knew I needed to be reading. I was drawn in this way to Lauren Camp for many reasons: her attunement to the world's problems, her love for bringing poetry to older and younger communities outside of the academic universe, and her belief in poetry as something that isn't static on the page but dynamic and carried by all. I returned home, read her collection The Dailiness two times through, and took months to follow up with her about an interview in part because there were so many poems in it that spoke to me, and with an immediacy that made me care. I'm looking forward to spending time with One Hundred Hungers, her latest book. And check out her radio work with Audio Saucepan, as well as her recording and discussion of Jack Gilbert's "Failing and Flying" at the Sundress Publications blog. – HLJ
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My first reaction to this poem was to feel as if you’d just confessed something intensely private to me, as if over late-night drinks at the kitchen table.
That’s a wonderful reaction, and oh lord, why am I always confessing things? Lately, I’ve been writing about politics by writing about what I want to turn away from.
In my poems, I commingle analytical thought and optimism. I always want (somehow) to reach the beautiful—and if not a beautiful resolution, at least an emotionally responsive (and therefore beautiful) poem.
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RAIL RUNNER EXPRESS CRASH ON I-25 SOUTH OF SANTA FE
One summer day, I witnessed the murder
of speed and money, a train
and armored car twined beneath a pockmarked sun.
I missed the tire squeal, but sat
In the nervous framework of vehicles
that bloomed down the Interstate. An ambulance
had been dispatched. We all gawked
as an EMT tended the scrapes and whispers
flung against the road – in this same threadbare spot
where a gasoline truck toppled, then exploded
several months before, metal
melting to its unsuspecting driver.
Even now I fear the whack, the severed bodies
swallowing thready air.
How much easier it is to be looking over
what has rolled over through light fragmented
on the underside of someone else’s car.
We continue driving forward, frantically strategizing
details and errands until we meet tomorrow’s headline.
But this is my bend in the road,
my wrecked railing.
A personality test defines me as lemon-sour
so I take the test again, changing answers.
Forgive me.
This time it calls me blue
And I become a river of blue, flowing back and forth
on the Interstate in my beat-up Subaru,
never putting my compassion down,
never leaving the road with my imperfect eyes.
Phillip B. Williams. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
I first met Phillip B Williams at the Best New Poets reading at AWP 2015 in Minneapolis, after being moved immensely by his poem “Do-rag”. It’s a pleasure to interview him for the blog over a year later, having seen the release of his book Thief in the Interior, which could not be timelier reading in the wake of recent police violence in this country’s ongoing war on black bodies. With this poem, Phillip explores the workings of a mutable and constantly uncertain identity. Emotive as well as smart, probing as well as generous, the language in his poems carries both music and the invitation for the reader to look and think deeply. This one of Phillip’s is previously unpublished, and I thank him for entrusting me with it. — HLJ
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Reading this poem puts me in mind of the Talib Kweli line you quote in your book Thief in the Interior: “But I never write to remain silent.” There’s a recurrence in your work of this theme of silence, from silence as coping mechanism (“If I don’t speak then maybe I won’t die”), to the silencing of the other (“no one listens”). How does this particular poem of yours connect to that silence?
I think in this poem silence operates as both an identifying marker for the powerless but also an omen; the quiet before the storm, so to speak. There’s a kind of puppetry that happens when power is wielded in the way this poem is critiquing. But what happens when the puppet decides to speak for itself and to act on its own accord? What happens when the puppet behaves outside its true nature and acts fully human, rage and all?
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OF THE QUESTION OF THE SELF AND HOW IT NEVER QUITE GETS ANSWERED
In the poem, figure A is distilled to shadow and floor-looking.
Figure B musics crane-necked, anticipatory for the nih-nih.
I’ve always been a sucker for nomenclature.
The many ways I nigger without knowing.
I’m so Black I’m somebody’s mama sewing
her eyes to the ground. Shamecracked. Akimbo in exclusive gaze.
Lawd, Lawd, Lawd—who is I talking to and where is I? One must
prepare to be seen at all times astounded into erasure, ill-imagined.
Some of us eat watermelon in the closet, breath fermenting
and vulpine, to be able to, at all, eat without being eaten.
Safe in the umbra room dancing ensues, uncaricatured O.
Figure B sniffs figure A. Figure A is hips and textile. Puppet-pulled.
History yawns from the Os of likely weapons, a viper in the shade.
I know because in me the dark is alive and the dark makes plans.
Joanna C. Valente
“People aren’t comfortable with being proven wrong, or realizing that a great person can say things that aren’t always right,” Joanna C. Valente said to me during a warm-up Google chat prior to our interview. The topic of our conversation: the idea of “safe spaces” for marginalized groups or victims of trauma. Such spaces are great in theory but practically impossible, she argued, because they negate the possibility that victims can also make mistakes. I’d found this judicious view of human nature rare, but there it was. “I’m in favor of neutral spaces over safe ones,” Joanna said. “Put people in a room together and allow them to respectfully disagree. The result won’t always be ‘safe,’ but at least people are talking.” I’d like to think of poetry as this kind of room for important conversations, and here is a writer who’s using hers. – HLJ
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As someone who loves the idea of a life before and after this one, I found a lot to appreciate about this section of Marys of the Sea. But because it's a long/book-length work, could you give us a bit of context, maybe tell us more about the work as a whole?
The book is based on my sexual assault and subsequent abortion (I became pregnant after it happened). I began writing it about two years afterwards, and so the experience was still fresh in my memory though I’d managed to gain some perspective on it. I wrote it through the personae of Mary, mother of Jesus, and of Mary Magdalene -- partly because I wanted to explore the idea that women are rarely seen both as maternal figures and as sexual beings. But because I’d attended a Catholic school for 14 years, the two women were characters I’d been obsessed with and kept returning to.
The story of mother Mary is strange in that she becomes pregnant without her knowledge or consent, which always troubled me. After going through my experience with the assault, I couldn't help thinking back to the creation story of Jesus, what it says about the denial of women’s ownership over their bodies throughout history. These poems became a way of reclaiming my body and mind through that season of hopelessness and powerlessness. And I should add that the persona helped me write about my experience more objectively, which then made it more enjoyable because I wasn't simply myself, and easier because I didn’t have to be me, if that makes sense.
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MARYS OF THE SEA, PART V
Looking for voices on paper
feel red all over his gummy mouth
starts to take form in my belly
hunger stops when grief replaces
my stomach lining two bodies
in one body sprouting brambles
& birds in my ears becoming deaf
to one history becoming two
histories two souls repeating
the lives of all the souls before this
one there was poetry before this
life lodged between both of us
without the dead I would lonely
be in eastern standard time
when I didn't change my name
two bodies need two names
& how does abandon form
in building how does a human
form in another human give
away another human to no one
sorceress tongue spews
spells for dead hands to throttle
what I could not inverting
empty on its head X-ray of terror
there were no repeated lives
Cortney Lamar Charleston
Some write poetry with an eye towards beauty and their own experience, but it’s a different and very necessary kind of poet who arrives at the page with the intent to unsettle, to shake others from their sleep. From the instant I discovered him during my routine reading on the web, it was clear that Cortney Lamar Charleston is that other kind of writer – in his use of poetry both as art and as path to change, of everything from our relationships to the wider social fabric. In this time of violence against marginalized groups, it feels more important than ever to shed light on those artists who prod us awake to others’ pain, who keep us from rolling over and going back to sleep. I’m grateful to Cortney for the reminder, and for taking the time to do this interview – after just getting back from a retreat at Cave Canem, no less. – HLJ
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I came across “I’m Not a Racist” in One Throne and instantly appreciated the truth-telling in it, this calling out of this country’s racial reality which is frankly a situation most people in my own experience are unlikely to discuss in “polite conversation.”
I’m really happy that you found the poem! Interestingly, I think the unlikelihood of race ever being part of polite conversation is the conceptual foundation of the entire poem. Because people try to avoid the topic completely, it leads to a lot of “mental gymnastics” aimed at skirting around the subject, but language has evolved in such a way that different words, when strung together, can mean the same thing. I can say that I’d rather avoid going to certain neighborhoods because they’re “sketchy” – or, I can say I don’t want to go to that neighborhood because it’s full of poor people or black people, or something along those lines. Either way, whether it’s explicit or implied, the meaning is the same because the word “sketchy” does not have a clean history. I pay less attention to someone’s exact words than to the shadow those words cast on me as the listener or reader.
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I’M NOT A RACIST
I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,
acting a littering of public sidewalks, I simply
move to the other
side of the street, play it safe. I keep it on me at all times, for safety purposes.
In the event of open fire,
you'd be a hazard I told them when I, regrettably, couldn't
allow the lot of them into the party.
We're part of the same
political party, according to all the numbers I've seen.
When I shut the schools down, I was just
doing what must be done
to balance a city budget out of wack. When I put what
I found in his trunk on balance,
it was enough to tip the scale
towards a felony. I used to be a waiter, and they never
tipped very well in my experience.
While we were placing bets,
I noticed him tip his hand ever so slightly and there was
a ̶̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ face card in it. He didn't seem
like much of a bluffer, so I stood
my ground. On the grounds of merit – that's how I got
into Yale. I'm just not that into black
girls, personally. I mean, personally,
I don't SEE color. I'm so sorry, I really didn't see you there.
There they go, using that word again:
if they can say it, then why can't I?
I can't understand why everybody is so sensitive these days.
I admit, what I said sounded a little bit
insensitive, but believe me, I'm not
a racist. I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,
acting a littering of public sidewalks,
I simply move to the other side.
I keep it on me at all times, for purposes: in the event of a
hazard, open fire I told them, regrettably,
looking at the body splayed before me.
Catherine Abbey Hodges
Rare is the moment when a newer poet gets approached by an experienced one with the offer of a hand with their project, and so I was grateful when Catherine Abbey Hodges gave me a free copy of her book Instead of Sadness, expressed her support for the blog, and invited me to connect. Later over a brief phone call, I learned that, like me, she'd once considered pursuing an MFA in poetry and then opted for the alternative path. I'm quite sure that no one reading her first collection would doubt that this path has served her: in poem after stunning poem, I was treated to models for my own work, a richness of music, and a depth of field that can only come from an alertness to none other than the school of life itself. – HLJ
===
First off, I just have to mention that I read your poem “An Algebra of Fifty” to my husband and he loved it, and he said also that his mother would love it – someone who went back to get her master’s degree to teach mathematics in her mid-fifties. Here's a poem about someone trying to figure it out.
Well, regards to your husband! I’m gratified that the poem spoke to him. And yes, the “someone” in the poem is indeed trying to “figure it out”, using tools and formulas that worked in the past, and finding them ineffective.
But before we go any further I should say that although most of the poems I write are fairly accessible, some remain at some level mysterious even to me. “An Algebra of Fifty” is that latter kind of poem, and so though it’s mine, I don’t know that I can speak with any certainty about its meaning or intention. Still (and maybe in fact for that reason), I welcome the opportunity to talk about it as a way of deepening my own relationship with the piece.
===
AN ALGEBRA OF FIFTY
Out back between the marvelous
weeds and the volunteer tomatoes,
she's a windsock in mid-life's rush
hour breeze. Day shuts down
all over. One plus n equals
match strike, doorbell, hush
of the crowd. Voices through
a window across a canyon, voices
across water, crickets in the ivy.
Anise seed on the tongue – texture,
then taste. Regret – taste, then
texture. A letter being opened
in Lisbon. Or not being opened
in the next room. Not the idea of God,
after all, nor God's proximity,
but the light under a door.
The breeze picks up, makes a nest
of her hair, as she solves for n
with all she's got. Behind her, the moon
rises burly, gibbous. The edges
of everything whistle.
Yep. That's Matt Muth. And a scimitar.
My encounter with Matt Muth at AWP in Los Angeles consisted mostly of sitting across from him at the book fair and watching him repeatedly throw a ball in the air while hawking his Seattle-based publication Pacifica Literary Review. In what would eventually turn into an amusing experiment in meta-conversation, the raw transcript of my Google chat interview with him is shot through with bracketed wisecracks that belie a dead-seriousness over big ideas. Incidentally this would be my first contact with his expression “embiggening”: a word that sounds a lot like “beginning”, and a place I sense this poet returns to often when he’s not running a publication or headed to his next hockey game. “I am a monument,” he writes in a recent Facebook post, and not without irony, “to failing upward.” – HLJ
===
Your poem "Learning a Foreign Language", recently out in RHINO, dances at the edges of everyday vocabulary. On the surface it would seem intimidating to a reader who doesn’t know what a postulate or onanism is, yet the poem as a thing is shockingly unpretentious. What triggered the writing of it?
It basically grew out of a feeling of not being good enough for a significant other, but more specifically the feeling that when this person looked at me they were speaking a completely different language than I was when I looked at me, if that makes sense. And the poem is about that odd disconnect between who you thought you were and what you thought you were made of, compared to what an observer looks at you and sees. That was the generative emotional place of the poem.
===
LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
I needed to associate like with like, object
with suggestion. I needed to be trained. I taped
index cards to my possessions: the nightstand
said onanist, the toilet said equivocator; my desk
was narcissist, and the venetian blinds
were all cowards. I had some nouns, but soon
this was not enough learning: I needed adjectives,
verbs, I needed fluency. Each pair of boxer-briefs
got a false advertising patch stamped
on the codpiece; I wrote won’t block shots
on the blades of my hockey skates in lip gloss,
each new term a wine grape in my mouth —
I burned vestigial into each rib and shaved
vapid on the side of my head. I’m getting better
with practice: soon we’ll be able to communicate —
you’ll sit across from me mouthing words
and pointing, your hands their own bright
postulates, and I’ll thrill with understanding.
verbs, I needed fluency. Each pair of boxer-briefs
got a false advertising patch stamped
on the codpiece; I wrote won’t block shots
on the blades of my hockey skates in lip gloss,
each new term a wine grape in my mouth —
I burned vestigial into each rib and shaved
vapid on the side of my head. I’m getting better
with practice: soon we’ll be able to communicate —
you’ll sit across from me mouthing words
and pointing, your hands their own bright
postulates, and I’ll thrill with understanding.
Kelly Weber
I was a bleary-eyed and fast-fading bookfair exhibitor on day two of AWP when Kelly Weber approached the Primal School table and nearly made me spill my coffee by mentioning “the democratization of poetry education." Two possibilities occurred to me; she’d either read my mind or my personal slogan for this blog wasn’t so unique after all – a recognition that was hugely liberating. Here's what became evident to me during our interview: her love of sound and audience and language, her patience for knowing every frontier of creative possibility in a poem’s writing, a bone-deep enjoyment of the teaching process, and perhaps above all else, her reverence for the wild world. – HLJ
===
I've been spending a bit of time with your poems and fiction and am inspired by a thematic through-line in your writing, this occupation with the natural world. In writing your poem "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things," was there a specific trigger or memory? How did this poem come to you, or how did you come to this poem?
There’s definitely an ecological streak to my poetry and fiction. I don't write a ton of fiction because my brain seems to groove on poetry, and so even my fiction emerges with a strongly poetic bent...but the predominant theme of animals makes its way into both, certainly. Because I discovered the same wild streak surfacing repeatedly in my poems, I decided to make that the focus of my unpublished thesis collection, "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things". On a broad scale, this group of poems focuses on the day-to-day encounter of humans with animals. What small things do we humans take for granted? What power do we assume over small things like bugs or snakes that make its way into "our" spaces: homes, garages, etc.? I think there's a lot of room to look at our faults and weaknesses when meditating on an animal or wild thing, and also when we talk about our stories and interactions. That's been the broad theme of the thesis.
So with the poetry – and major thanks to Gravel for publishing this poem – I've been submitting my work here and there. There were actually two sources of inspiration for "Field Guide”. The first was an experience I’d had as a seventh-grader when our teacher led us through the woods, over a period of months, to record what we saw. We actually got to walk in the woods behind our school, which was a nice change from being in the classroom, but at one point we hit a creek and the teacher asked everyone to jump over it. I took one look at it and thought, "Yeah...no." I can't swim, and it was winter and I was pretty sure I'd slip on the ice, so I stayed behind and just tried to jot down what I could. All these years later that incident seems so emblematic of my life: I wanted to be a bio major, but I wanted to sit and observe things more than I wanted to cross the creek.
So this incident kept resurfacing in my daily freewriting and in the notes I took here and there, and two things emerged: that image of the other students fading away from me, leaving my English/biologist-wanna-be self behind, and not knowing what to do with it beyond that. When I finally put the thesis together, I had the idea for a collection with the name "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things", but didn't have the title poem written yet. It finally occurred to me to try combining those two orphaned threads of thought, and I think it ignited them both. The poem had an end and the collection had a piece that I felt captured what I was trying to do in all the poems, which was record the small and dead or harmed and wild things in our lives – while also honoring those things through poetry and careful observation of the world around us. Which I think is its own way of honoring all life.
===
THE FIELD GUIDE TO SMALL DEAD THINGS
We chart our course west across field
and tail our seventh grade teacher
from brick-scalloped science room
to woods beyond the school,
spiral-bound notebooks in hand
to practice our powers
of observation: wind, weather, February sun.
At the chain-link fence
woven into diamonds,
he slips a key into the padlock
and unhooks the magical silver stirrup
to lead us through the border
from school to woods beyond.
We crush monochrome-crusted grass
and trace the runic grooves
of haw bark, sap asleep
as filaments in unlit bulbs.
The forest teethed with silver
and carbon, where leaves
of seasons past clot beneath our feet.
Ahead, the creek zinced with ice
has thawed a little, burbles
raw live iron. One by one
the teacher helps us step across.
I sway over white-ringed stones
moss-slick and treacherous
and I refuse.
The other students move on,
their blue and green coats recede
and I linger on the other side.
While they crouch over handprints
of mysteries, what’s crossed at night
unseen so close to learning’s doorstep,
I—as fearful
of poor grades as drowning—
fill my notebook with everything
they don’t see, not worth noticing:
rock and clay water’s chewed away,
branch-rattled cold,
all things blued and breathing
left in quiet after children
migrate toward what’s pointed out.
Another world beneath this ochre one
lidded and stirring.
And by April’s time, I’ve trained this eye
with each month’s trip, each stop
at the river’s line, I’ve twirled
the pencil’s rule and covered pages
in graphite. At deadline,
I type my log of small descriptions
and names to hand
to the teacher sailing rows.
To our mutual amazement,
he thumbs it to reveal tables
pegged and socketed with tracks,
snapped twigs, sky deceased
the common thousands
and common millions
I recorded in wire spirals.
Window after window
opens to kestrel chests
and finches plucking seed, gold—
somehow, in creating
the field guide to small dead things
I’ve catalogued the coming of the spring.
Niel Rosenthalis
I recently met Niel Rosenthalis at AWP in Los Angeles at the Deadly Chaps Press booth, by chance after missing an author signing (something that seems to happen to me a lot at these kinds of events). We got to talking about poetry and agreed to keep in touch. He wrote me after the conference offering to help out with Primal School, and the more we spoke and I got to know his work, the more honored and grateful I felt for having met this force of a poet. I’ll let the interview serve as proof, but I’ll add that just this week, Niel has been offered the Third Year Fellowship in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. — HLJ
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In your recent interview with Joanna Valente for Luna Luna, you described how in writing your first chapbook collection, TRY ME, you saw “trees, grammar, the mechanical goings-on, etc. as […] a struggle with each other.” That struggle interests me as a reader of your poems; could you tell us more about it?
In that interview I think I was making a point about how I don’t distinguish, really, between the mechanical and the natural, and how that group of nouns came from the process of writing via erasures — mostly of nonfiction books and novels. ERASURE is the practice of making a new text out of an existing one. You look at a text, say, an article or a novel, and you decide to whiten out all the words you don't want, so you're left with the words you do want – and the idea, for me, is to make a poem out of those words. Basically, it's like an enormous ready-made word bank.
In the way that I use erasure (other poets use it very differently), the poems sound the same as poems I might write without erasure. My subjectivity shows through whatever I do. Sometimes the process exposes me to new words that excite me in a new way, and sometimes I use the words I would use anyway, but because I’m working within this formal restriction, only using the words before me, something in me is reoriented. Trees, grammar and the mechanics of the way things work form a part of my Image Bank, I guess — which I’d define as that group of images I find myself obsessed with. Every poet has an Image Bank. And out of this bank, I try to work out whatever is agitating me about my perception of experience.
So I take you keep a notebook to aid in storing that Image Bank? Or do these images come to you in your writing, like a daydream?
Good question – I keep a notebook and write pretty often. Sometimes I sit in a public place and just observe what I see. I take notes when I'm reading poems, essays, scientific articles, books on the history of ancient Rome (or whatever it is I'm doing – I read pretty widely and sometimes deeply and sometimes not, haha). I copy down great sentences and wonder how they work — what makes them pleasurable to me, and so on. I find that I do have a set group of words that comes to me when I’m just free-writing, and so just to push myself, sometimes I'll open up a book (say a book of poems or a random nonfiction book I have laying around the house), and pick ten words that really stand out to me just because I like them. They don't have to be especially complicated, they just need to excite me. For instance, if I turn to the word bank I started recently, I see the words: extension, forward, expanse, proof, rapprochement. I don't think I finished building that bank, but sometimes when writing I say, “Okay, let me see if I can get that word into the poem because I like how it sounds.” I don't have to keep the word, but if it gets me excited on the page, it can generate a few lines that do work well (and often I'll have to go back and cut the word I pulled from the image bank because the line it was in didn't end up working). Which isn't to say the Image Bank makes or breaks a poem! What really makes a poem exciting to me is the tension in it – and poets have different ways of generating this tension. Some use really elaborate syntax, i.e. the way the words in a sentence or a line come together over time. Others simply have a funky Image Bank. Still others prioritize using the page as a kind of field, skipping around and building arrangements of words that challenge one’s sense of how one word follows another. And all poets use some combination of these three tension-generators, because syntax, word choice, and page space all can be manipulated. They form the technical stuff of which poems are made.
Affirming to know I’m not the only one who approaches writing in this way; seeing what words call to me in my reading and finding a home for them in my poems . So many poems are really just houses built of stolen lines, words, ideas… there’s nothing contraband about it when you’ve made something new out of them. And your playfulness with syntax does intrigue me, so let’s talk about “Placed.” Fascinating story behind it: you say the poem was cut from 40+ pages of observation in a time and location? Tell us about that process.
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PLACED
An Intersection
I was sitting at a table outside in the night. The people around me ate and drank in comfort, a few notches below bliss. What else is hammered. Watch your tone. I can’t, it’s like the back of my head.
One house lit-up with a birthday banner
in the foyer; the sneezing dogs on their
evening out; a semi-present wish
to stop all this.
Some people pose for a picture. “Wait, guys, let’s get one of us laughing at each other.” Laughter is a form of what kind of thinking. What’s worse: the people or the reclamation of want the people bring out in you.
I kid myself.
I say, “I like my sweetstop tongue.”
I can’t look
to be a part of all this.
An Exchange
On a tour of the city, I was hit by the sight of white dahlias (“Always place description in the present tense.”)
The dahlias were in a toss from last night’s flash flood. The hill they were planted on made them lean. And then I remembered what it was like to see something for the first time.
“What would it look like?”
— A woman with a braid down her back, to her friend at the café.
“I wanted to know what a poodle cut looks like on a person, a kind of mullet…with a tight bun at the back.”
Pausing to fill in, one said, “Well at least it will grow back,” to which (he’d missed the point) she said, “no, no, it was great, glad we did it.”
Be absorbed by minutiae.
He’s aside of this now so if he wants to leave he can leave without walking through a door.
A Separation
The couple in green sat at the table with fries, which their hands went to, then to their mouths, then down to their laps. At times one went for it while the other waited, or both went, or neither. One touched the other’s knee. The other had arms closed together and turned her head this way and that. What they were was how they were. To that end, I watched from my box. (Around me the people sat in theirs such that they could look at or to the street, where the people passed.) Pass the salt, please. One did.
This interview with Caitlin is one of three posts on the site that were written for The MFA Project in fall/winter 2015, prior to the start of Primal School.
The poetry of Caitlin Doyle has received wide praise. Michelle Aldredge of Gwarlingo says of her work: “Caitlin Doyle writes highly original poems…steeped in both meaning and musicality…Doyle’s poems are serious and complex, but also witty and playful, and it’s this tension that makes her writing so innovative.” One of the benefits of our online format is the opportunity to occasionally feature long-form interviews. I got to talk with Caitlin about her work, her MFA experience, her journey as a writer and teacher, and topics relevant to writers and poets on both sides of the MFA divide. — Hannah
Your voice as a poet is very distinctive and I’m thinking of what sets your work apart, such as your skill with rhyme and other formal elements, and your blending of narrative and lyric modes. What do you think of the frequent criticism that MFA programs end up producing voices that sound the same?
It’s important to enter an MFA program with this central understanding: There’s a difference between challenging your aesthetic values in meaningful ways and letting your pen become a conduit for trends buzzing in the air around you. The workshop environment can sometimes spur writers, consciously or unconsciously, to seek immediate pay-offs in the form of peer approval, rather than pursuing the harder-won rewards that come with creating work that operates entirely on its own terms. Though writers have long depended on feedback from others, the idea that truly strong writing can take shape via group consensus is a potentially dangerous one for emerging writers to absorb. It’s necessary for MFA-seekers to cultivate openness, but it’s just as crucial for them to resist pressures that push them too far away from idiosyncratic self-determination.
Which reminds me of your advice to beginning writers in your interview with Words With Writers: “Take your time to develop arduously, painstakingly, and privately, rather than throwing your writing too hastily into the universe for recognition. Be a homemade writer rather than a world-made writer—only then will the world truly want and need your work.” Can you talk more about what it means to be a “homemade writer”?
Recently, I’ve been re-reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”, a poem in the voice of Daniel Dafoe’s most famous fictional character, Robinson Crusoe, who spends years shipwrecked on a tropical island. I keep coming back to the part of the poem where Crusoe recounts playing a “home-made flute” that he has crafted out of materials found on the island. Remembering the instrument, which seems to have possessed “the weirdest scale on earth,” he says:
“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”
This interview with Michele is one of three posts on the site that were written for The MFA Project in fall/winter 2015, prior to the start of Primal School.
I first met Michele Bombardier at the recent Poets on the Coast conference with Susan Rich and Kelli Russell Agodon in La Conner, WA, an event in which time slows for art, women gather with their words, and poetry is a nymph dancing wildly on the Skagit River for three packed days. She was glowing so brightly I asked her out to lunch…and this interview happened. — Hannah
Tell us a little about your MFA experience. Specifically, let’s talk about pros and cons: what are some good reasons to pursue an MFA in creative writing? What are some of the challenges?
It was an agonizing decision. I have a perfectly good graduate degree and career, so I was not interested in an MFA to become a teacher; my goal was, and still is, to deepen my craft. I also felt the pressure of time. I am 55 years old, and even though I have been writing for a while now, I am relatively late to the party. My hope was that an MFA program would compress my learning curve to a steep incline.
The con is pretty simple: money. I have three college-age kids. We put one through, one just started, and one stopped but hopes to return. We are middle class. This is hard stuff. We ended up taking a loan against the house. Call me crazy.
If I didn’t get an MFA I would have continued doing what I have been doing for the past five years: taking classes at Hugo House, the community writing center here in Seattle, meeting with my writing groups, working with editors/teachers I’ve hired to review and critique my work, and attending conferences where I could, though those can get pretty spendy.
What advice would you offer to poets and students of writing who aren’t part of an MFA program? How might they structure and self-direct their writing education?
Find mentors. I took David Wagoner’s Master Poetry class multiple times at Hugo House and was incredibly grateful for those experiences. I’ve also studied with Tara Hardy, Kelli Russell Agodon, Gary Copeland Lilley and Wyn Cooper. I think it’s also important for writers to attend classes and form writing groups. The classes and groups come and go, but over time, you find your poet-siblings who will help raise your work. I love working with my friends Lillo Way and Ken Wagner, whom I met in David Wagoner’s course, and they still kick my poetic ass.